Victor Hugo - Les Misérables (1862)

214 Sourced Quotes

View all Victor Hugo Quotes
A tempest ceases, a cyclone passes over, a wind dies down, a broken mast can be replaced, a leak can be stopped, a fire extinguished, but what will become of this enormous brute of bronze?

Victor Hugo
Work, which makes a man free, and thought, which makes him worthy of freedom.

Victor Hugo
Who can calculate the passage of a particle?

Victor Hugo
Work is the law of life, and to reject it as boredom is to submit to it as torment.

Victor Hugo
Do not economize on the hymeneal rites; do not prune them of their splendor, nor split farthings on the day when you are radiant. A wedding is not house-keeping.

Victor Hugo
Death has a way of its own of harassing victory, and it causes pestilence to follow glory. Typhus is an annex of triumph.

Victor Hugo
Cuvier, with one eye on Genesis and the other on nature, was striving to please the bigoted reaction by placing fossils in harmony with texts, and letting Moses be flattered by the Mastodons.

Victor Hugo
Wonderful nature has a double meaning, which dazzles great minds and blinds uncultivated souls. When man is ignorant, when the desert is filled with visions, the darkness of solitude is added to the darkness of intelligence; hence, in man, the possibilities of perdition

Victor Hugo
No matter who you are, the thought of so much suffering and degradation must cause you to shudder at the sight of a veil or cassock, those two shrouds of human invention.

Victor Hugo
What is the cat?" he exclaimed. "It is a corrective. God, having made the mouse, said, 'I've made a blunder.' And he made the cat. The cat is the erratum of the mouse. The mouse, plus the cat, Is the revised and corrected proof of creation.

Victor Hugo
Have but luck, and you will have the rest; be fortunate, and you will be thought great.

Victor Hugo
To know how to distinguish the agitation arising from covetousness, from the agitation arising from principles, to fight the one and aid the other, in this lies the genius and the power of great revolutionary leaders.

Victor Hugo
The peasants of the Asturias believe that in every litter of wolves there is one pup that is killed by the mother for fear that on growing up it would devour the other little ones.

Victor Hugo
Love, thine is the future. Death, I use thee, but I hate thee. Citizens, there shall be in the future neither darkness nor thunderbolts; neither ferocious ignorance nor blood for blood.

Victor Hugo
It is the peculiarity of grief to bring out the childish side of man.

Victor Hugo
The most ferocious animals are disarmed by caresses to their young.

Victor Hugo
Man is not a circle with a single centre; he is an ellipse with two foci. Facts are one, ideas are the other.

Victor Hugo
It is sad to tell, but after having tried society, which had caused his misfortune, he tried Providence which created society, and condemned it also.

Victor Hugo
The sunshine was delightful, the foliage gently astir, more from the activity of birds than from the breeze. One gallant little bird, doubtless lovelorn, was singing his heart out at the top of a tall tree.

Victor Hugo
Algebra is applied to the clouds, the irradiation of the planet benefits the rose, and no thinker would dare to say that the perfume of the hawthorn is useless to the constellation.

Victor Hugo
It may be remarked in passing that success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblences to merit.

Victor Hugo
Wide horizons lead the soul to broad ideas; circumscribed horizons engender narrow ideas; this sometimes condemns great hearts to become small minded.Broad ideas hated by narrow ideas,-this is the very struggle of progress.

Victor Hugo
Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing.

Victor Hugo
Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.

Victor Hugo
Indigestion was sent into the world to read a lecture to our stomachs...

Victor Hugo
She had had sweet dreams, which possibly arose from the fact that her little bed was very white.

Victor Hugo
When we are at the end of life, to die means to go away; when we are at the beginning, to go away means to die.

Victor Hugo
A man trying to escape never thinks himself sufficiently concealed.

Victor Hugo
It seems as though, at the approach of a certain dark hour, the light of heaven infills those who are leaving the light of earth.

Victor Hugo
The supreme ordeal, let us say rather, the only ordeal, is the loss of the beloved being.

Victor Hugo